


spiteful, in a million ways

by risettos



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Enemies to Lovers, Falling In Love, Internalized Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2019-10-25 21:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17732879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/risettos/pseuds/risettos
Summary: "whizzer brown," yearbook photographer guy holds out a hand to shake. marvin smiles- polite, tight- and takes it.the moment his their hands brush, marvin jerks his hand back as if he'd been burned. he stares at whizzer, eyes wide, horrified, and stumbles back a step before he runs out of the room altogether.or: in a world where everything is black and white until you touch your soulmate, marvin just wants to know just why fate seems to hate him so much.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> !!!!!!!!!! first fic in this fandom pls be gentle w me im but a wee child sjhgfghs.
> 
> anyways the characterization might be iffy for this first chapter and nothing much happens bc im still just setting up but i swear it'll get better as time goes on aaaaaaaaa sooo skjhgdhj i hope yall enjoy!!
> 
> warning // can't believe i forgot this earlier but use of the f slur!!!

 The alarm lets out its first unholy shriek at six in the morning, and Marvin’s hand shoots out from under the covers, feeling for the alarm clock on top of his bedside table with sluggish, early-morning movement. When his hand finally finds the snooze button, he all but slams it before burrowing his face back into the comfort of his pillow and drifting off once more.

 Five minutes later, it goes off again, and Marvin groans and throws the blankets off of him with a scowl before dismissing the alarm. With a grumble, he sits up and stares blankly at the wall for a few minutes, blinking away the grogginess and questioning his life choices.

 This is how Marvin starts his day every morning.

 He hauls himself up to his feet and stretches his arms and yawns; he walks out of his bedroom, still rubbing his eyes and still yawning a little bit more, his steps slow and clumsy as he makes his way to the bathroom. Then he looks at his black-and-white reflection in the mirror and splashes water on his face and reaches for the toothbrush and toothpaste and clean glass perched carefully on the shelf beside the bathroom mirror.

 His routine involves brushing his teeth, and then eating breakfast, and then brushing his teeth again. It also involves him wondering why he needs to brush his teeth before breakfast, as he stares at himself in the mirror and brushes his teeth for the first time that day.

 Marvin spits. Marvin gurgles. Marvin rinses. Marvin drinks some water and joins his little brother at the table.

 Jason is nothing short of a child genius.

 Marvin can see why, too— the kid’s flipping through his Maths book with one hand while spooning cereal in his mouth with the other. Marvin makes a face as he pours cereal into his own bowl. (Apparently, they’re supposed to have a different color corresponding to whatever the flavor is, but Marvin thinks it’s stupid that only privileged fucks who have a decent lovelife can enjoy it, and since neither he nor Jason are privileged fucks in the love department, the cereal only looks like they’re colored a variety of grays to the both of them.)

 “Morning,” he tells Jason, who looks at him and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

 “Morning!” Jason says, his smile gap-toothed and wide. Marvin represses the urge to coo. He pours milk in his cereal and eats his breakfast. Jason studies. Marvin finishes. Marvin showers. Marvin fixes up for school, kisses his mother goodbye, and lets his father drive them to school.

 “You should join the football team,” his father says, eyes on the road. “And get some new friends.”

 “My friends are fine,”

 “They are if you’re a _faggot_ ,” his father sneers. Marvin looks out the window. Jason, smart for his age yet still at the ripe and innocent age of seven, asks, “What’s that?”

 “Something I’m _not_ ,” Marvin says sharply. “I’m already in a club, dad,”

 “Right,” his father says, vowels elongated, voice dry and bemused, “The _theatre_ club.” He says it like he’s proving a point, which he isn’t. It’s just a club, Christ—

 Marvin purses his lips and inwardly seethes and looks out the window, picking at the hem of his shirt.

 There was a time in Marvin’s life when, he supposes, his father had been proud of him.

 When all his parents had done was coo over him— telling him he’s so smart, their little boy— he’s going to be a great lawyer one day; or doctor; or some other high-paying job that required a lot of brains to get into. Or they’d call him handsome. So handsome and charming, their Marvin— he’s going to break all the pretty girls’ hearts one day.

 But one thing they never forgot to tell him about— in fact, they’d probably go on and on forever if they could— would be how he’s going to meet a very special girl one day. Some girl with a sweet smile, a soft voice, a cheerful demeanor. Some girl who’d complete him. Some girl who’d stay with him and keep him happy for the rest of his life.

 “You see, son,” his father told him once, his voice carrying over the baseball game currently being broadcasted on TV. Marvin’d been trying to get into the game, for his father’s sake, but he couldn’t help the way his lips pursed and his fingers twitched and his knees bounced impatiently as the game had dragged on, “We all have a girl— yours is out there, somewhere, waiting for you.”

 “Huh,” six-year-old Marvin said in reply, eyebrows scrunched together, staring blankly ahead at the television screen. (He thought someone may have missed the ball, but he’s not very sure.) He wasn’t particularly interested in what his father has to say, because he was six years old and six-year-olds aren’t particularly interested in talking about girls and houses and dogs and children of their own. “Okay.”

 Marvin’s father had grunted and the boy had looked up without so much as missing a beat, his eyes wide and unblinking as he stares up at his father, the boy’s shoulders rising as he gradually braces himself for the worst. But the man only laid a hand on Marvin’s shoulder and said, “Did you learn about colors?”

 “Uh-huh,” Marvin said. Then after a moment’s consideration he added, “They’re black and white right now, but they’ll change, right?”

 He searched his father’s eyes for a semblance of pride, and when his father’s lips curled into a smile Marvin felt the corners of his mouth turn upwards in return as well.

 “You’re such a smart boy,” his father said, “A very special girl’s going to give you those colors one day.”

 He ruffled Marvin’s hair, and Marvin smiled up at him and giggled and went back to trying to understand the game.

 But then Marvin had joined the drama club and picked up chess and grown to detest sports with a passion. And Marvin had broken up with Trina when she moved away, and hadn’t found anyone else to date since. But then Marvin had grown up and become so unlike what his father had wanted him to be, and suddenly everything he’d become and everything he’d done was wrong, wrong, _wrong_.

 The car skids to a halt and Marvin blinks, mind reeling as he’s pulled back from his thoughts. He mumbles a goodbye under his breath and gets out of the car, careful not to slam the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

 

 The library is quiet, filled with nothing but the crackle of a book’s yellowed pages as somebody flips through them and the soft scratching of pencil tip against paper. Marvin’s scribbling frantically in his notebook, half the page already filled with messy strings of words written in barely-coherent chicken-scratch. He hums under his breath, narrowing his eyes at the newest lines of dialogue he’d just written. With a groan, Marvin tears the page out and crushes it into a ball.

 “The paper did nothing to you,” Mendel says, sitting across Marvin. He’s reading a battered copy of The Great Gatsby. He hasn’t looked up from his book at all.

 “Yes, but this play has,” Marvin scowls, huffing under his breath. The play’s going to be the first original one their school’s going to put up— which makes it kind of a big deal, not that anyone else in the damn school cares. They’re all too busy getting between everyone else’s legs. Still, though— Marvin’s not going to let any of that deter any of his drive to make this fucking _amazing_ —

 The low, dull _thump_ of a hardbound book being snapped shut breaks Marvin from his reverie, and he makes a face down at the blank page and at the realization that he’d been spacing out instead of actually doing anything productive. The louder— yet still fairly soft— noise of the book being placed on top of the table makes him look up and meet Mendel’s raised eyebrows and curious eyes with his own dry, exhausted gaze.

 “And what, pray tell,” Mendel says, clapping his hands together as he inclines his head towards the notebook, “Has the play done to you?”

 Marvin ignores him in favor of pressing the tip of his pen against the fresh, blank sheet, lips pursed. A small black ink blot slowly spreads across the piece of paper. He taps the pen against the paper a few times more with a sigh, groaning as he tries to think of something to add, but in the end his mind draws a blank and he tosses the pen on top of the table.

 “It’s stressing me out,” Marvin finally responds, with a bitter tone to his voice and a frown on his face as he glowers at the blank sheet as if glaring at it hard enough would make the pen levitate and write the whole damn thing by itself. When the pen doesn’t so much as budge, of course, but Marvin feels disappointed nonetheless and slumps back against his seat. Mendel snorts and Marvin glares, because why doesn’t _he_ try writing the goddamn play, the bastard.

 The rest of Marvin’s routine usually goes like this: Marvin gets to school and survives through his morning classes. He actually listens to the lectures, unlike everyone else in the classroom, who are busy passing notes and throwing paper airplanes and are all-too-busy staring at the history teacher’s ass. He eats lunch with Mendel and sometimes Cordelia, and listens to Mendel bitch about some girl in one of his classes— whatshername? Diane? Caroline? He never can remember.

 He goes to his afternoon classes a little bored, and he scribbles random doodles on the edge of his textbooks and notebooks. He writes a little bit, trying to fit a few more lines of dialogue in between taking notes and paying attention to the teacher.

It’s mundane. It’s awful. It’s routine.

It’s normal and actually slightly comfortable, and Marvin likes normal and comfortable.

 He’s near the last portion of his routine now, the last couple of hours in a school day that club would usually take up— except his club isn’t meeting at all today, so he’s just hanging with Mendel, and for a moment he hears his father’s voice in the car and feels something ugly crawl up his throat, and he looks around them as his heart picks up and his thoughts race, calculating how likely it would be that someone sees them and misconstrues this entire situation completely—

 “Hey, man,” Mendel says, waving a hand over his face, and Marvin blinks and realizes he hasn’t been breathing.

 His breathing slows as he tells himself that everyone else really doesn’t pay him and Mendel much mind— they don’t get shoved into their lockers and get their head dunked in toilet water or anything. He shouldn’t worry too much, because he and Mendel are usually left alone, because they’re neither too smart nor too stupid, and they look at girls wearing their frilly skirts and tight blouses, holding out a hand to shake in hopes of seeing the world around them melt into hues that aren’t black or white.

 They’re normal, so Marvin shouldn’t worry too much. He and Mendel are—

Normal.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> marvin is just really tired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im not super happy with this one but hey it's an update and well i promised myself i'd finish this fic so haha.
> 
> it's also super short considering that i spent several months trying to write it ugh i hate block.
> 
> i hope yall enjoy this one!!

 “How was your day, son?”

 Marvin’s father voice booms in contrast to the clinking of everyone’s metal utensils against the delicate porcelain of his mother’s China. Marvin moves the chicken around his plate, dark sauce staining the white surface.

 “Fine,” Marvin says, picking on his mashed potatoes. His mother sends him a stern look from across the table. Marvin rolls his eyes. His body feels like it weighs a hundred tons, his eyes barely light enough to keep open. His stomach churns, demanding sustenance, but he can’t bother picking up a bit of food with his spoon and shoving it into his mouth.

 This is routine.

 “How was _your_ day, Jason?” his father asks next. Jason’s eating quite— enthusiastically, if Marvin should say so himself, shovelling spoonful after spoonful into his mouth, bits and pieces of potatoes and sauce and beans splattered around his lips.

 “—ad a _teht_ ,” the kid says around the bolus in his mouth. Marvin finds himself grimacing when food sprays out back onto the plate. Jason, to his credit, looks embarrassed, scratching the back of his neck and holding out five fingers. Jason swallows and drinks some water. “I aced it,” he continues, beaming, bits and pieces stuck between his teeth and all.

 Marvin bites back a sigh. This is his normal.

 “Really,” Marvin’s mother is saying. She’s leaning in just a little bit closer, fingers poised around the stem of her fork like she’s holding something precious. She stabs a singular pea and eats it. The way her mouth moves around the pea is calculated and graceful and perfect as well. Marvin makes a face.

 He tunes them out for the rest of the dinner. He’s sure he can predict everything his parents and brother are saying, anyway— because it’s always the same stupid, mundane things, all the time. In the morning when he gets up for school it’s _Good morning, honey. Hey, sport. Breakfast is ready. Have a great day at school. Love you._ In the car ride to school it’s _You need to get new friends. Ace all your tests, okay? Make me proud, son._

At dinner it’s _How was your day, honey? How was your day, son? How was your day, Jason? Oh, really? That’s good. That’s great. Mm-hm._ Then it dissolves back into silence.

 He stares down at his plate as the food filling it up gradually disappears. He blinks and then it’s empty and his stomach is full and he’s holding a fork with a final piece of chicken leg impaled on it. He eats that last bit, downs it with some water, and stands up, the chair dragging against the floor with a high-pitched screech that makes him shudder.

 This is routine.

 “Bring your plate to the sink,” his mother reminds him. She sounds almost distracted. Marvin picks up his plate and walks into the kitchen. He drops the plate into the sink almost carelessly— it clatters loudly against the steel but he didn’t drop it hard enough to break.

 But it’s loud. Loud enough.

 It almost feels like he’s making a point. Rebelling against the monotony of his life.

 His mother doesn’t yell at him anymore. He does this every night.

 This is routine.

 

* * *

 

 

 The moment Marvin gets to his bedroom, all he wants to do is collapse into a heat on top of his mattress and sleep for maybe forever. Like he hasn’t got anything to do tomorrow. Like he doesn’t have homework due or quizzes to take or a script waiting inside his bag like a ticking time bomb waiting for fuse to run out and explode in his face.

 He slams the door shut behind him and runs a hand through his hair and groans. He considers just following what his body tells him to: get some rest, go to sleep and don’t come in tomorrow. Forget all the deadlines and tests and assignments waiting for him tomorrow.

 But his mind is on overdrive and it’s never going to stop whirring, whirring, _whirring_ so damn irritably in his head, nagging and nagging and nagging, until he takes out his shit and gets some work done.

 He sits at his desk and buries his face in his hands.

 He doesn’t want to work just yet. He wants to sit back and close his eyes and maybe dream of a better tomorrow. But he can’t, because this is routine, and this is what he does to be normal.

 He loves it. He hates it with every fibre of his being. It’s relieving and it’s comfortable and it’s normal. It’s stifling and it’s suffocating and it’s slowly eating at him from the inside-out.

 Marvin groans and slams his head against the desk. He winces when sharp pain stabs through his skull. Straightening up and then leaning against the chair, Marvin stares up at the ceiling and asks it what he should do.

 He could call the girl whose number he’d gotten earlier today— some pretty thing named Hannah. At least, Mendel had called her pretty. She’d looked normal, if you asked Marvin.

 He reaches into his pockets and pulls out a piece of paper, pursing his lips as he contemplates the digits written on it in loopy print. How can numbers be “loopy”? Marvin’s got no fucking clue.

 He contemplates a little more and then shoves the number back into his pocket.

 Hannah hadn’t really stood out. Marvin doesn’t really feel compelled to call her. But Mendel’d told him she was cute, and pretty, and beautiful, and had been sneaking glances at him the entire semester, and Marvin’d shrugged and held out a hand to shake and when she took it the world didn’t explode into color or anything, but he’d taken her number just in case because she looked sweet and dressed nice.

 Maybe Marvin just has really high standards. After all, people were pretty much falling at Trina’s feet way back when she was still here. Or maybe Marvin’s just waiting for _the one_.

 

* * *

 

 

 Here’s the thing: Cordelia can’t act for shit.

 She’s always stumbling on the longer pieces of dialogue and giggling as she reads some lines, but in the end it’s still just high school theatre, and high school theatre means being severely low on members as well as rarely ever being top-tier. Still, though— Marvin has to say, Cordelia is perfect for the role; Marvin had actually written the character with her in mind.

 He nods to himself as Cordelia acts out a very bad portrayal of her character weeping, and he wonders, the blunt end of his pencil tapping against the mess of sheets of paper on the table, if he should just turn the thing into a whole satirical comedy instead.

 Cordelia fumbles in the middle of the line and Marvin looks away from her to divert his attention towards a relatively blank— well, compared to the rest— sheet of paper. He raises his hand, staring intensely even as the words start to blur together into an unintelligible mass. He rubs his eyes with the back of his other hand. The sharp end of his pencil hovers over the sheet in contemplation.

 A line of dialogue starts to come together inside of Marvin’s head. It’s still distant, barely a concept just yet, and Marvin closes his eyes. If he manages to get past the blood pounding in his temples and the exhaustion in his bones, the way his heavy sways a little too much to properly stand upright, he can almost hear it, a whisper flitting around his ears—

 Something screeches, cacophonous, and the words are drowned out and dissolve into the air.

 Marvin snaps his head to the side; glowers at Mendel who’s already in the process of sitting down next to him, chair facing the wrong side and legs spread around the part that supports your back. “How’s the script going?” he says, grinning, like he just hadn’t rudely interrupted the greatest breakthrough in playwriting history. Marvin lets out a cry contained in his puffed up cheeks like a kettle’s muffled screams and slams the pencil down, lead breaking when it hits the paper.

 Mendel winces. “Not well.”

 What is he even _doing_ here? He’s not even part of the drama club. He’s not part of _any_ club, because he at one point had announced it to be some sort of hindering bullshit that held him back from _elegantly branching out into the wide, spacious plains of freedom_ as much as he can.

 And they’re friends. They really are. And Marvin appreciates his company. But Marvin really doesn’t like it when Mendel keeps asking questions and rambling nonsense when Marvin is so clearly trying to fix the awful script its less-than-mediocre re-enactment onstage.

 Marvin’s aware that this is high school theatre. This doesn’t mean Marvin can’t be a perfectionist.

  “Uninspired,” Marvin says dully, too tired to even be mad anymore. Black spots are dancing in his line of vision, and nausea is starting to creep into the back of his head— which feels a little too light to be healthy. He rereads the newest segment and cringes, the few lines of dialogue it had reduced to scribbles over mistakes and tiny words written above the scribbles.

 It’s so awful and unsalvageable it’s sad.

 He tears the sheet off the roll and crushes it in his fist before tossing it in the general direction of the trashcan.

 “What did the piece of paper ever do to you,” Mendel says, somewhat mournfully. Marvin ignores him and presses the tip of his pen against a fresh, blank sheet, his lips pressed together. A small black blot of ink stains the piece of paper. He taps the blunt end of his pen against the surface of the sheet just a few more times, groaning, but in the end his brain draws a blank and he ends up tossing the pen onto the desk.

 “It’s stressing me out,” Marvin finally responds, words gritted out between clenched teeth. He narrows his eyes at the sheet as if glaring at it hard enough would make the pen levitate and write the damn thing by itself. Which it doesn’t. Even while it’s subject to the most threatening glare Marvin can possibly muster.

 “You need a break,” Mendel says, sagely. “You’re stressed and under pressure.”

 “Shut up,” Marvin grouses.

 Mendel, being Mendel, carries on like he hadn’t heard him. “It’s like taking a shit. You can’t force it out, and if you do, it hurts like hell and isn’t a very good shit.”

 “Oh my _God_.”

 “You need a muse. An inspiration. A metaphorical bad burrito—”

 Blood is pounding in Marvin’s ears. A headache is threatening to detonate his head into bits from the inside of his skull. He reaches a hand up to massage his temples and squeezes his eyes shut. Please, just a little bit of peace and quiet—

 Three knocks wake him from his reverie, and Marvin’s eyes snap open and he tries very, very hard not to scream through his teeth and blow smoke from his ears like a steaming kettle. There’s a very small creak that indicates the auditorium’s doors being pushed open slowly. He runs his hands through his curls and reluctantly stands up and turns around.

 Two other students are stepping inside. Marvin doesn’t know either of them, which isn’t really surprising. It’s a big school, and Marvin isn’t really involved in most of the social circles.

 “Yeah, hey, afternoon,” he says, coughing and clearing his throat. Cordelia’s voice peters out into silence, and the rest of their (admittedly measly) club members have looked up from whatever they’ve been doing to regard the newcomers.

 Marvin presses his lips together on his way to meet them. He doesn’t know where to put his hands. He ends up clasping them over his front. “What can we do for you?”

 The girl— she’s on the right, short and chubby and dark-skinned and stern-looking with her hair cropped short, reaching just beneath her ears— offers a courteous smile. The guy on her left— bright eyes, broad shoulders that slope down to a narrow waist, hair slicked to the side with a fringe that brushes his eyebrows— says, “Well, this is more people than I expected.”

 That does not help Marvin’s migraine. At all.

 Marvin’s cheeks flare up. His shoulders tense and his fingers twitch. The girl swiftly elbows her companion, and Marvin takes satisfaction in his pained grunt. He coughs lightly, repressing the urge to glare up at the guy because he’s still so much _taller_ and _broader_ than Marvin. “Yeah. Great, okay, what do you need?”

 The guy opens his mouth to say something but the girl cuts in. “We’re from the yearbook committee,” she explains, and the slanted glare she sends in the direction of her friend makes Marvin feel nothing short of glee. He lets his shoulders relax. She carries on. “We wanted to ask if it’d be okay to document the play. You know, the whole process. Start to finish.”

 Marvin is silent. He takes note of the notebook tucked underneath her arm, and the camera hanging from the guy’s neck, albeit with a little more caution.

 “You’ll get used to him,” the girl sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose like she’s exhausted.

 Marvin purses his lips and sighs in return. “Let’s talk terms first.” It’s not like he’d say no. He isn’t an absolute monster.

 The girl nods. She holds out a cordial hand. He takes it. The world doesn’t explode into color, thank God, because he wouldn’t know what to do if having a soulmate meant having to tolerate the boy beside her.

 And it isn’t fair, he knows, because he barely knows the guy. But he makes Marvin’s stomach twist and skin prickle and gut churn like some kind of instinctual warning bell, which Marvin really doesn’t find pleasant.

 “Charlotte DuBois,” she says.

 “Marvin Levitt.”

 He pulls back and looks at the— photographer, presumably— who’s wearing a smile that Marvin figures would be charming but right now only looks vaguely irritating.

 “Whizzer Brown,” yearbook photographer guy says, holding out a hand to shake. Marvin regards him— the way he’s easily at least a head taller than everyone in the room, the way his gaze makes Marvin feel like he’s teetering on the edge of a cliff— and for some reason, hesitates.

 “What?” Whizzer Brown says. “I don’t bite.”

 Marvin smiles— and his mouth feels tight but he’s trying to be as polite as he can manage, okay— and takes it.

 His skin is warm, and Marvin blinks and the bland, murky shades of gray are _gone_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> btw::: thank you for the comments!!! i know i need to learn how to respond to them better HaHa but i just needed to tell y'all that i do read them and they motivate me and they all make me feel super mushy and warm inside and i appreciate them a whole lot so!!! thank you!!! from the bottom of my heart
> 
> anyways. i hope you enjoyed!!
> 
> _nix.

**Author's Note:**

> leave a kudos or a comment if you want <3 skjhk theyd be greatly appreciated


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